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Miranda July's Bookcase

Miranda Jennifer July (born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger on February 15, 1974) is an American film director, screenwriter, actor, author and artist. Her body of work includes film, fiction, monologue, digital media presentations, and live performance art. She wrote, directed and starred in the films Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and The Future (2011). Her most recent book, debut novel The First Bad Man, was published in January 2015. July was a recipient of a Creative Capital Emerging Fields Award.

Photo by: Nikolas Becker (foto/at/nikolasbecker.de)

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An Anthology

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's diversified approach to art embraced work in painting, sculpture, graphics, film, "light machines", stage design, typography and commercial art. "Fine Art" - the museum object - was peripheral to Moholy's purpose. Believing that "everybody is talented", he attempted to invent forms and images that would be meaningful to all. In his passionate concern with the individual and his faith in the social values of art, Moholy was one of the inspired teachers of our century. Moholy was also highly articulate and a number of his most forceful writings, drawn from all periods of his life, form the core of this collection. Essays reprinted here touch on his theories of art, his social vision, his principles of education, the potentialities of motion pictures, still photography and light as a self contained medium of expression. Also included are essays by a number of important figures in art and architectural history. More than 80 photographs show how Moholy realized in physical form the concepts and theories expressed in his essays. "Moholy-Nagy - An Anthology" aims to be both a reference work and a stimulating experience for anyone interested in 20th-century art and culture.

For 31 years, artists Dieter Roth and Dorothy Iannone conducted a love affair through letters, postcards, telegrams, notes, poems, and texts, and through the works of art they made for and about each other. Completely open and trusting, their intelligent, honest correspondence, reproduced here chronologically, tells their story in a form much like that of a novel.
Introduction by Dorothy Iannone. 9.5 x 12.5 in.
illustrated throughout

King Kong Theory is Despentes' candid account of how she became notorious: reviled and admired in equal measure for her rape-revenge novel turned film, Baise-Moi, she is the poster girl for modern female rebellion. Powerful, provocative and personal, King Kong Theory describes the ways her ideas have been shaped by her experiences of rape, prostitution and working in the porn industry. Feminist theory sheds its fusty image and takes on a punk mentality as Despentes claims that sisterhood explodes our belief in feminine perfection and creates a space for all those who can't or won't obey the rules. Woolf and de Beauvoir are revived and updated by the loudest, most fiercely unapologetic misfit writing in France today.

In his second collection, including the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.

Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers. She has been called "an American virtuoso of the short story form" (Salon) and "one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis's short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.

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Fischli and Weiss are highly prestigious, bluechip contemporary artists who work with sculpture, photography and video, positioned at the very cutting edges of new art. They represented Switzerland in the Venice Biennales of 1995 and 2003, and won the Leone d'Oro prize in the latter for their slideshow Will Happiness Find Me? is an air of quiet unpredictability. The mood of the work ranges from the humorous (a clay figure group of 1981, for example, entitled Mick Jagger and Brian Jones Going Home Satisfied after Composing 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction'); to the banal (a photographic series devoted to Airports); and even the apparently invisible (their Untitled installation, simulating through minutely detailed polyurethane sculptures an unfinished exhibition site). the Quiet Afternoon series, photographs of miraculously balanced objects. The pair's work also seems able to overcome the constraints of time and space, for example in their apparently endless journeys, resulting in the innumerable Visible World picture-postcard photographs of cities all over the world. With a truly unique body of work which is sometimes childishly thrown together, sometimes a virtuoso triumph of sculpture and moving image, this is the first book to draw together the mystery and contradiction of Fischli & Weiss. include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1992), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988) and the Tate Modern, London (2005).

On a cold, rainy night, an aging bachelor named George Ticknor prepares to visit his childhood friend Prescott, a successful man who is now one of the leading intellectual lights of their generation. With a hastily baked pie in his hands, and a lifetime of guilt and insecurity weighing upon his soul, he sets out for the Prescotts' dinner party--a party at which he'd just as soon never arrive. Distantly inspired by the real-life friendship between the great historian William Hickling Prescott and his biographer, Ticknor is a witty, fantastical study of resentment; and a biting history of a one-sided friendship.

The Cloak, The Black Pestilence, The Comb

This comprehensive retrospective of Sophie Calle not only celebrates the breadth of her iconoclastic work but also leads to a deeper understanding of her unique artistic vision. The work of conceptual artist Sophie Calle embraces numerous media: photography, storytelling, film, and memoir, to name a few. Often controversial, Calle's projects explore issues of voyeurism, intimacy, and identity as she secretly investigates, reconstructs and documents the lives of strangers - whether she is inviting them to sleep in her bed, trailing them through a hotel, or following them through the city. Taking on multiple roles - detective, documentarian, behavioral scientist and diarist - Calle turns the interplay between life and art on its head. The book presents Calle's best-known works, including "The Blind", "No Sex Last Night", "The Hotel", "The Address Book" and "A Woman Vanishes", as well as lesser known and earlier projects that have largely escaped the public eye. The book also includes diary excerpts and video stills, along with three critical essays, a revealing interview with the artist and a dialogue with fellow artist Damien Hirst.